History may be perceived as snaphots, faded sepia photographs in the national photo album, or it may be thought of as a video, continuously running and always recording new scenes. History as "original intentions" or "original meaning" is static; history as "vectors" is dynamic. Thus, in attaching meaning to "cruel or unusual punishment" one might wish to ascertain the contemporaneous definition of the term. The pillory was certainly not unusual in the late eighteenth century, but surely it is now....

The word "vector" just came up in the comments to the fatness ≈ homosexuality post, and it struck me that the use of the word "vector" — outside of the technical scientific contexts — suggests the presence of bullshit. It's has that scientific vibe, but if you're not talking about something like astronomy or math or physics, it's probably an effort to make something seem precise and evidence-based when it's not. In math, a vector is "A quantity having direction as well as magnitude, denoted by a line drawn from its original to its final position." (OED.)

I'm pleased to see that the Supreme Court has never used that word. (The word appears in 2 places in the entire Supreme Court case file, but only because there was a party named Vector Distribution Systems in 2004, and a party named Electro Vector in 1977.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Pete said "I can't be bothered to see if this clip was used in the fat/gay thread but it seems appropriate here":

Let's Hector the Vector. Directionally force these bullshitting academics out of the Vector Sector.

Hilarious that the author uses "cruel and unusual punishment" as the example. It's a constitutional provision that is, by its own terms, is designed to change meaning with the times. That doesn't suggest that the entire Constitution should be viewed that way.

Vectors have a very clear use in understanding politics at the levels of theory and testing. Take a look at the good old dialectic. Opinion A and Opinion B bump heads and resulting policy C is a factor of not only the opinions themselves, but the number of people holding them and the intensity to which they are held. Each variable in a multi-variate regression is essentially a vector, and many of these models hold a great deal of explanatory power.

Bullshit words cascade over and around me all the years of my life. At times I've tried to predict those to come, as a game for myself and as pro-active defense. They are ceaseless and nauseating. I tried to keep distant from their users because such are very dangerous, deceivers.

"Forward" is an old bullshit warhorse. "Celebrate" I especially abominate. There is also bullshit sentence structure, and syntax, in addition to bullshit words. All these seem to originate with professors then are vectored by their students to bureaucracies, where they harden and hurt as a kind of constipation. Bullshit can be a bullshit word.

Vector is also a military term, especially in strategic discussions. In all it's applications it signifies purpose, goal, telos, a fact frequently overlooked.

So a word is bullshit if it doesn't match the context, according to the Professor. Even if it's obvious what's meant. Gotcha. I'll just stop typing now, since obviously meaning is impossible with words.

There are lots of personalities in these days whose every utterance is bullshit and every one of those is a disease vector. Gales of bullshit storm from the fingers and mouths of "the people's" minders. All harm all. Pussy President.

It's interesting that the word predates the sciences (physics and epidemiology) that adopted it for very specific meanings. It comes, apparently, from the Latin verb for "carry".

A true originalist might protest that the word is not scientific and signifies little more than a guy with a load of grapes in a sack, or something. Would this be Clarence Thomas's position? (Sorry for the misuse of the word "position" there.)

Also: I had a TF in college who once circled the word "impact" in a paper I wrote on a philosophical question. In conference, he told me he didn't approve of the use of the word, because social sciences had, in his opinion, inappropriately adopted it. I may have used it as a verb, like "this thing has impacted this situation". That rings a bell; maybe it was partly turning what the TF perceived to be a scientific noun into a social-science verb that he disliked. It rang a bell with him somehow.

The "vector" passage probably would have sounded fine to me when I was a 1L over a decade ago. But reading it today, it reminded me of the scene from Dead Poet's Society in which Robin Williams' character had his student read aloud a passage from a poetry textbook about plotting a poem's "importance" on a graph. Williams' character next forced the students to tear the offending page from the book.

"Hilarious that the author uses "cruel and unusual punishment" as the example. It's a constitutional provision that is, by its own terms, is designed to change meaning with the times. That doesn't suggest that the entire Constitution should be viewed that way."

Indeed.

"It is not "cruel OR unusual." It is "cruel AND unusual." Insidious, manipulative newspeak slips in everywhere."

Take these points together and you see a powerful move. Misquoting the constitutional text is particularly bad.

I went and double-checked to make sure it wasn't my mistranscription, but it was not. And this it the 3d edition of the casebook.

tradguy & ricpic:Actually, the line "the trajectory of an object's vector of force depends upon opposing forces at work on the object" makes perfect sense from a mathematical physics POV, where a "vector" is a 1-D matrix of descriptors (which could be forces), and a "trajectory" is simply the sequence over some parameter (e.g. time) of that vector in the corresponding descriptor space.However, I did not study math-physics with the intent of using it to parse legal phrasing, so I guess all that work was wasted.Sob.

It strikes me(another word with multiple implications) that we use a lot of words that we have no clue about their correct usage. And that we are all just limping along with approximations of what we said to other people. Not just what they perceive either. But a true lack of understanding of ourselves.

History may be perceived as snaphots, faded sepia photographs in the national photo album, or it may be thought of as a video, continuously running and always recording new scenes. History as "original intentions" or "original meaning" is static; history as "vectors" is dynamic. Thus, in attaching meaning to "cruel or unusual punishment" one might wish to ascertain the contemporaneous definition of the term. The pillory was certainly not unusual in the late eighteenth century, but surely it is now....

I know nothing of "the law." But I'm somewhat disappointed that a university-level law textbook reads not unlike one of my elementary school Social Studies textbooks from 1962.